Quotes from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“For in tremendous extremities human souls are like drowning men; well enough they know they are in peril; well enough they know the causes of that peril;--nevertheless, the sea is the sea, and these drowning men do drown.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“I say, I can not identify that thing which is called happiness, that thing whose token is a laugh, or a smile, or a silent serenity on the lip. I may have been happy, but it is not in my conscious memory now. Nor do I feel a longing for it, as though I had never had it; my spirit seeks different food from happiness, for I think I have a suspicion of what it is. I have suffered wretchedness, but not because of the absence of happiness, and without praying for happiness. I pray for peace -- for motionlessness -- for the feeling of myself, as of some plant, absorbing life without seeking it, and existing without individual sensation. I feel that there can be no perfect peace in individualness. Therefore, I hope one day to feel myself drank up into the pervading spirit animating all things. I feel I am an exile here. I still go straying.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“…for it is often to be observed of the shallower men, that they are the very last to despond. It is the glory of the bladder that nothing can sink it; it is the reproach of a box of treasure, that once overboard it must drown”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“But this whole world is a preposterous one, with many preposterous people in it.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“From without, no wonderful effect is wrought within ourselves, unless some interior, responding wonder meets it. That the starry vault shall surcharge the heart with all rapturous marvelings, is only because we ourselves are greater miracles, and superber trophies than all the stars in universal space.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“Pierre little foresaw that this world hath a secret deeper than beauty, and Life some burdens heavier than death.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“In the operative opinion of this world, he who is already fully provided what what is necessary for him, that man shall have more; while he who is deplorably destitute of the same, he shall have taken away from him even that which he hath. Yet the world vows it is a very plain, downright matter-of-fact, plodding, humane sort of world. It is governed only by the simplest principles, and scorns all ambiguities, all transcendentals, and all manner of juggling. Now some imaginatively heterodoxical men are often surprisingly twitted upon their willful inverting of all common-sense notions, their absurd and all-displacing transcendentals, which say three is four, and two and two make ten. But if the eminent Juggularius himself ever advocated in mere words a doctrine one thousandth part so ridiculous and subversive of all practical sense, as that doctrine which the world actually and eternally practices, of giving unto him who already hath more than enough, still more of that superfluous article, and taking away from him who hath nothing at all, even that which he hath,—then is the truest book in the world a lie.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“a gentle sister is the second best gift to a man;”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“Love was first begot by Mirth and Peace, in Eden, when the world was young. The man oppressed with cares, he can not love; the man of gloom finds not the god. So, as youth, for the most part, has no cares, and knows no gloom, therefore, ever since time did begin, youth belongs to love. Love may end in grief and age, and pain and need, and all other modes of human mournfulness; but love begins in joy. Love's first sigh is never breathed, till after love hath laughed. Love laughs first, and then sighs after. Love has not hands, but cymbals; Love's mouth is chambered like a bugle, and the instinctive breathings of his life breathe jubilee notes of joy!”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“Is it possible, after all, that in spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of commonplaceness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim, can not resolve?”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“Love sees ten million fathoms down, till dazzled by the floor of pearls. The eye is Love's own magic glass, where all things that are not of earth, glide in supernatural light. There are not so many fishes in the sea, as there are sweet images in lovers' eyes. In those miraculous translucencies swim the strange eye-fish with wings, that sometimes leap out, instinct with joy; moist fish-wings wet the lover's cheek. Love's eyes are holy things; therein the mysteries of life are lodged; looking in each other's eyes, lovers see the ultimate secret of the worlds; and with thrills eternally untranslatable, feel that Love is god of all. Man or woman who has never loved, nor once looked deep down into their own lover's eyes, they know not the sweetest and the loftiest religion of this earth. Love is both Creator's and Saviour's gospel to mankind; a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

“Eternally inexorable and unconcerned is Fate, a mere heartless trader in men’s joys and woes.”
― Herman Melville, quote from Pierre: or, the Ambiguities

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Popular quotes

“But let's not speak of what might have been. Let us speak instead of what is. You are whole.”
― Kate DiCamillo, quote from The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

“I loved the feeling of talking and having somebody really listen to what I have to say. It was like a high or something.”
― Jenny Han, quote from The Summer I Turned Pretty

“It’s 1991. Can you believe it? We’re poised on the edge of a new century, for better or worse. I guess we’ll all make up our own minds which. The year 1964 seems like ancient history now. The Polaroids taken in that year have turned yellow. No one wears their hair like that anymore, and the clothes have changed. People have changed, too, I think. Not just in the South, but everywhere. For better or worse? You can decide for yourself. And what we and the world have been through since 1964! Think of it! It’s been a faster, more brain-busting ride than ever could be devised by the Brandywine Carnival. We’ve lived through Vietnam — if we’ve been fortunate — and the era of Flower Power, Watergate and the fall of Nixon, the Ayatollah, Ronnie and Nancy, the cracking of the Wall and the beginning of the end of Communist Russia. We truly are living in the time of whirlwinds and comets. And like rivers that flow to the sea, time must flow into the future. It boggles the mind to think what might be ahead. But, as the Lady once said, you can’t know where you’re going until you figure out where you’ve been. Sometimes I think we have a lot of figuring out to do.”
― Robert R. McCammon, quote from Boy's Life

“We cannot tell the rain when to come, nor the winter, nor the cold.”
― Peter V. Brett, quote from The Warded Man

“If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will."
"Self-will? And why is it your duty?"
"Because the will has all become mine. Can it be that no one on the whole planet, having ended God and believed in self-will, dares to proclaim self-will to the fullest point? It's as if a poor man received an inheritance, got scared, and doesn't dare go near the bag, thinking he's too weak to own it. I want to proclaim self-will. I may be the only one, but I'll do it.
"Do it, then."
"It is my duty to shoot myself because the fullest point of my self-will is--for me to kill myself...to kill someone else would be the lowest point of my self-will, and there's the whole of you in that. I am not you: I want the highest point, and will kill myself...It is my duty to proclaim unbelief," Kirillow was pacing the room. "For me no idea is higher than that there is no God. The history of mankind is on my side. Man has done nothing but invent God, so as to live without killing himself; in that lies the whole of world history up to now. I alone for the first time in world history did not want to invent God. Let them know once and for all.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, quote from Demons

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